The Wreckage of Ravi Zacharias 

A confession: I am probably too angry to be writing about the Ravi Zacharias scandal. The report from the outside investigator, as reported by Christianity Today, regarding the abuse of multiple women by the apologist, demonstrates that the pattern here was worse than what even those expecting the very worst could have imagined. This report pictures not a mere “moral failure,” but a pattern of predation that can only be described as criminal, sociopathic, and, indeed, satanic. 

My friend David French has published an extensive account over at The Dispatch, which looks at the report—and other information we had not yet seen—in extensive, and gut-wrenching, detail. 

In some ways, perhaps I am especially angry about what we learn in this report because of the personal aspect. Two of those treated reprehensibly when raising what turned out to be completely accurate lines of questioning on this—Sam Allberry and Ruth Malhotra—are friends of mine, and I resent the way that they were lied to and dismissed with gaslighting. And part of it is that I, to an order-of-magnitude less seriously, was lied to myself. 

In planning the MLK50 conference for April 2018, mapped out years before, we had invited Ravi Zacharias to speak on the implications of racial injustice for Christian apologetics. When the first reports of the allegations about correspondence between Zacharias and a woman in Canada surfaced, I was alarmed not just by the allegations but by Zacharias’ response to them. He told me that he was falsely accused, and that these allegations were false—in general terms. 

But I said to him and to his team that I failed to see how, if that were so, he could not definitively state that he had not had any sexual conversations in this way with a woman not his wife, and that he had never, as reports suggested, pleaded with her not to tell her husband or that he would kill himself. We canceled Zacharias from speaking at the event. 

He was angered by that and made that very clear. He then had mutual friends call to seek to get me to change my mind. I said no. They assured me that time would show that Ravi was innocent of these charges—and I said that certainly could be true, and that I hoped it would be, but that I would not share a stage with him with what seemed to me to be evasive responses to very serious allegations. As time went on, of course, we along with the whole world saw that the allegations were far more than just what had been reported in the media. We also learned about payments and non-disclosure agreements. Every time more came out, the worse it was. And now this report reveals even worse than what we could have imagined. This is enraging at every level. How could charges like this have happened without those responsible looking at his electronic devices (which ultimately revealed the truth)? 

But what enrages me the most is what the report reveals about the way that Zacharias allegedly went about preying on his victims: by using the name of Jesus Christ to do so. One woman reports that after she experienced what she described as rape that Zacharias had her pray with him, thanking God for “the opportunity.” Such an action would be unspeakable—an act of blasphemy to empower predatory violence. 

According to this report, Zacharias also justified his behavior on the basis of how special he was as a renowned apologist, and that the women would be sacrificing the gospel going out to millions if they did not allow him his way. He also reportedly compared his predation to Old Testament patriarchs with multiple wives. Anyone who has worked for anytime at all on church sexual abuse will recognize these awful tropes immediately. 

It’s a bit surreal to be angry at a dead man, but many of us are—as well as at those who empowered him. We have seen so often this pattern, with lives destroyed all along the way. But it’s not enough to be angry. We should ask why this continues to happen. We should not be surprised that there would be people who would use the authority of Christ to prey on the sheep from within. Jesus and his apostles warned us about this (Jn. 10:8-13; 2 Tim. 3:1-9; 2 Pet. 2:1-22). What should shock us is that we continue to fall for it again and again. 

Often sexual abuse survivors in church circles—especially behind closed doors— are vilified as “Jezebels” or “Potiphar’s wife.” Sexual abuse survivors have had their reputations destroyed by people in power speaking of the assaults against them as “sexual immorality” or “marital infidelity”—as though they are to be blamed for what happened to them. I have even heard sexual abuse survivors tell me of organizations seeking to justify their own behavior hiring private investigators to search out the victims’ sexual history, to prove that the victims were “promiscuous.” This is antichrist to the core. 

Is it any wonder that evangelicalism faces a credibility crisis among our own young? To see where all this leads, simply look at Pew and other surveys about religious disaffiliation—and compare these with Stephen Bullivant’s study Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America Since Vatican II (Oxford University Press). The church is bleeding out the next generation, not because “the culture” is so opposed to the church’s fidelity to the truth, but just the reverse. The culture often does not reject us because they don’t believe the church’s doctrinal and moral teachings, but because they have evidence that the church doesn’t believe its own doctrinal and moral teachings. They suspect that Jesus is just a means to an end—to some political agenda, to a market for selling merchandise, or for the predatory appetites of some maniacal narcissist. 

The witness of the church is at stake. More importantly, the lives of those made in the image of God, those for whom Jesus died, are at stake. This awful report—coming on the heels of so many other situations detailed before—should rouse the conscience to ask not just how sadists can get into places of Christian leadership, but whether we have created a situation where the very presence of a conscience is an impediment to advancement in the Machiavellian and sometimes Caligula-like world of some sectors of American Christianity. 

Anger is not the ultimate answer. But it’s a start. 

What If You Were Converted or Discipled Under the Ministry of a Fraud?

Some people, I know, are in a unique moment of panic after the release of this report. Some of these people are not just feeling angered and betrayed, as Christians, but also feel especially insecure because some of them found Christ through this ministry or were strengthened in their faith through a time of doubt. And many others are reminded by this that they did so through someone who was later revealed to have been a fraud. Some of them wonder, “What does this mean? Is my faith itself a fraud?” 

This is hardly a frivolous question. Even those outside the faith find the same sort of alarm, sometimes at things far more trivial than questions of eternal standing before God. For instance, in their book on the greatest television shows of all time, media critics Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz write movingly about how alarming it was to re-watch The Cosby Show after learning about the multiple women testifying to their having been drugged and raped by the actor/comedian. 

What was once a light and diversionary situation comedy, now, in retrospect, seems dark and foreboding, filled with what feel like clues and foreshadowing of unspeakable crime. The critics say this is true with all of the series, but then emphasize: 

“Worse still is the season 7 Cosby Show episode ‘The Last Barbecue,’ in which guests at a cookout become more amenable to sex when they sample Cliff’s special sauce. Haven’t you ever noticed after people have some of my barbecue sauce, after a while, when it kicks in, they get all huggy-buggy?’ he asks Clair leering. ‘Haven’t you ever noticed that after one of my barbecues, and they have the sauce, people want to get right home?’” 

The critics conclude:

“Everything that was once funny, sexy, or inspiring about Cosby is unsettling now. Every value he claimed to stand for has been revealed as a lie. Everything he said or did, achieved or touched, has an asterisk, including his most significant achievement, The Cosby Show.” 

That’s chilling, and it’s an old television show that you can easily decide not to ever watch again or even to think about. But, again, how much more unsettling is it to relive what seem to be truthful statements you might have heard from someone you now see as a moral or criminal fraud about matters of your own soul? Does the gospel you embraced come with an asterisk too? 

That’s an important question, and you are not the first to ask it. 

The Apostle Paul recognized that some were preaching the gospel out of pretense and rivalry. He withstood them, but rejoiced that the gospel went forward (Phil. 1:15-18). A similar question arose much later, in the fourth century, with the Donatist controversy, which asked whether a baptism was valid if the clergy officiating at the baptism were shown to have later renounced Christ. The church—articulated most memorably by Augustine of Hippo—affirmed that baptism is not rendered valid or invalid by the holiness or lack thereof of the clergy overseeing it. 

Your salvation and discipleship are not dependent on whether the preacher from whom you heard the gospel is genuine, but rather on whether the gospel itself is genuine. It is.

Predators often move forward by hiding behind mimicked truth. Predatory filmmakers proceed by learning how to make good films. Predatory politicians go forward by honing political skills. Fraudulent religious leaders often peddle false doctrine, but some of them also traffic in true doctrines by which they have not personally been transformed. Yes, wolves often come with false doctrine. But that does not mean that wolves are limited to the flocks that tolerate false doctrine. In infiltrating a sheep pen, a wolf will come in the skin of a sheep, not that of a goat.

Judas Iscariot, after all, preached the gospel of the kingdom for some time. Imagine if you had heard the gospel from him, embraced it, and then discovered his end result. You would probably be shaken. What you responded to, though, was not Judas Iscariot, but the words he echoed from somewhere else. Test the message you received, even if you’ve learned to reject the messenger who carried it to you. As the Apostle taught us, “test everything; hold fast to what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21). 

After learning about someone fraudulent, you may then wonder whether you can ever trust anyone again. “Who else might be lying to me?” you might ask. It is good to be skeptical, again testing every message and messenger. But do not grow cynical, protecting yourself from future love or trust. Even in the darkest situations, we can always see the goodness of God, often in those who are rescuing the hurting.

When someone you admire does something disgusting or evil, don’t admire what is disgusting or evil. At the same time, don’t let your rightful disgust turn you to despair. Many who come in Jesus’ name are frauds. Jesus is not.

Swimming Out of the Shark Tank

In last week’s issue, I cited Seth Godin, including part of a conversation he had on the podcast of television producer Brian Koppelman. I also thought about that conversation this week when I caught a few minutes of a re-run of the reality television show Shark Tank, in which moguls evaluate potential investments in the businesses of entrepreneurs seeking their support. In his interview with Koppelman, Godin says he turned down an opportunity to be part of Shark Tank because they wanted him to be “the mean one.” He didn’t want to be that guy. 

He similarly said he knew how to make it in the film business because of the way that business “kept score.” He knew how to please the people that mattered there. “And I didn’t want to please them,” Godin said. He went with the book business because he could work with people who “kept score” the same way he did, valued the same things he did. 

When he found himself with clients who were lucrative in their contracts but were rude and difficult to work with, Godin says he dropped them and started over, even though that client accounted for a third of his business. “If we stick with them, we’re going to end up being the kind of people who are good at working with difficult clients, and I don’t want to be that kind of person,” he said. “And I want to do this for the reason I set out to do this, which is to do work that I’m proud of, in a way that I’m proud of.” 

“When you pick your audience, you pick your future,” he said. 

I know Seth Godin doesn’t mean it this way, but “When you pick your audience, you pick your future” could be a pretty good paraphrase of Galatians 1:10. 

Questions and Ethics 

The re-launch of the “Questions and Ethics” part of my podcast will post sometime this week. You can subscribe here. Please send me your moral dilemmas—about life, school, work, spirituality, family, whatever—and I’ll do my best to answer (and I’ll never, of course, use your name, unless you ask me to do so). You can send your questions to questions@russellmoore.com. 

Desert Island Bookshelf 

This week’s shelf is from Deborah Flora, who writes: 

“The first is my shelf of titles which resonated deeply, grew me, made me ponder, caused me to whoop ‘Me too...and I thought I was the only one,’ convicted me, changed me, reminded me of who I am in Christ, presented a love for beauty and delight in the everyday, showed the importance of simple work, presented the power of prayer, taught boundaries, showcased how different people relate to God, and held up happiness and hope in Jesus.

“My second shelf is filled with favorites that bring laughter and light in my life along with novels filled with fun, with characters brimming with personality, with integrity and ideals.”

What do you think? If you could have one bookshelf with you to last you the rest of your life, what volumes would you choose? Send a picture to me with as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like. 

Quote of the Moment

“The old Christian porch, that is to say, is becoming increasingly uninhabitable by moderately serious persons, which is to say our best young people. It is surely not too much to say that if Southern Christendom does not soon demonstrate the relevance of its theology to the single great burning social issue in American life, it runs the risk of becoming ever more what it in fact to a degree already is, the pleasant Sunday lodge of conservative Southern businessmen which offends no one and which no one takes seriously.”

— Walker Percy on racial injustice

The Courage to Stand 

You can order a copy of my newest book, The Courage to Stand: Facing Your Fear Without Losing Your Soul (B&H) here (or wherever you buy books). 

I would love to hear from you. Send me an email if you have any questions or comments about this newsletter, other things you would like to see discussed here, or if you would just like to say hello! 

If you have a friend who might like this, please forward it along, and if you’ve gotten this from a friend, please subscribe!

Onward, 

Russell Moore